How ING accelerated global iOS development

ING is a global financial institution with a strong presence across Europe, serving millions of customers with digital-first banking. Its mobile banking app is a core product, supported by a distributed team of 60+ iOS engineers located in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Romania, and Australia.

Slow CI pipelines caused app delivery delays

ING’s previous CI-as-a-Service (CIaaS) solution was not powerful enough for its mobile CI pipeline.

The shared, underpowered VMs with limited CPU and RAM caused unacceptably slow CI pipelines, as well as issues with automation processes. The lack of timely support for new Xcode versions and OS upgrade availability blocked iOS app submissions from being completed on time.

This led to engineers resorting to using their personal Macs for builds and tests, creating bottlenecks, reducing productivity, and eroding developer experience. With a globally distributed engineering team, these limitations risked delays in app delivery and compromised ING’s ability to support a critical digital channel.

Enterprise-grade compliance and performance with Orka

ING knew they needed to evaluate other options to streamline iOS development and chose to invest in MacStadium’s Orka solution.

ING now has dedicated bare metal Macs (not just packaged CI-as-a-Service VMs), ensuring reliable performance. They deployed 15 Macs in MacStadium’s Dublin data center, each running two Orka VMs, giving them 30 dedicated CI agents fully integrated with the ING infrastructure stack.

Orka helps teams get to market 50% faster

With Orka powering their CI/CD pipelines, ING achieved:

• 50% faster pipeline execution times, restoring velocity to their development cycles.
• Improved developer experience, eliminating reliance on personal machines for builds.
• Consistent, stable performance across global teams.
• Ability to run parallel jobs across 30 virtual machines, ensuring high throughput for tests and builds.

Most importantly, 60+ iOS engineers across six countries (NL, BE, IT, DE, RO, AU) now have equal access to fast, reliable Mac infrastructure, removing geographic barriers to collaboration and delivery.

Conclusion

Orka delivered exactly what was needed for the ING team: dedicated performance, scalability, and compliance to support a global financial institution’s mobile app development. By cutting pipeline times in half and restoring a smooth developer journey, ING’s engineers are free to focus on what matters most – building a world-class mobile banking experience for millions of customers worldwide.